Intro & Specs

Asus, best known for their high quality motherboards and video cards, have been adding CPU coolers to their product line-up. Today we take a closer look at the X-Mars. A compact cooler, made out of copper and aluminum and features 2 heat pipes.

The photo above is from the backside of the packaging, it’s clearly visible that they compare the X-Mars with a stock Athlon 64 heatsink when they talk about an 27% increase in surface area.

The Thermal compound is included in case you want to install the unit on different systems, or if you upgrade your CPU. The X-Mars comes with pre-applied thermal compound on its base.

Construction :

The X-Mars follows a compact, light-weight design; they chose for a copper/aluminum construction and a small 70mm fan which opens up to the top, to allow more air to be sucked in. The heat sink is giving a bit more “oomph” through the addition of 2 heat pipes.

You are probably wonder where the aluminum fins are, well, they come plated, so a bit harder to spot as these are electro-plated fins.

The base shows clear traces of machine lapping, performance might suffer slightly from the lack of a “mirror finish”.

The Smart Fan:

A whole section about a fan? Well the X-Mars’ 70mm one deserves it, although it certainly has no unique features, we found the temperature regulated speed-o-meter to be very effectively implemented.

In the photo below you see the make and model of the fan, but also a part of PCB sticking out. This is most likely a part of the “brain” of the Smart fan.

An even smaller PCB and temp sensor stick out at the other side:

In our performance tests we saw the fan speed increase/decrease keeping the CPU below critical temperatures, but we are running ahead of ourselves, let’s check out how to get the X-Mars installed ->